Monday, January 3, 2011

She has a point

Mary Ellen Synon does not precisely defend Viktor Orban, the ever more unpleasant but democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary. She merely points out the hypocrisy of those who criticize him and the new media law.

Also, check out what these let's-protect-the-Press eurocrats actually believe. First they believe in trying to influence journalists by way of big chunks of the commission's annual €2.4bn annual propaganda budget (that is the figure for 2008, calculated by Open Europe, and at todays exchange rate equal to just over £2bn). Plenty of perks, free trips, prizes and 'training' courses in nice places are available for compliant journos. In some cases the European insitutions simply hand cash to reporters for unvouched 'expenses.' (And before you ask, no, this blog doesn't take EU dosh.)

More to the point, look at the detail of the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty. Article 11 is supposed to guarantee 'freedom of expression and information,' including 'the freedom and the pluralism of the media shall be respected. ' (Wouldn't the judges at the European Court have fun defining 'pluralism?' Is Britain soon going to be forced to subsidise a national Islamic newspaper to ensure 'pluralism' in journalism?)

Okay, then keep going, past all the other 'freedoms,' until you get to the final article of the charter, Article 54: 'Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as implying any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms recognised in ths Charter or at their limitaton to a greater extent than is provided for herein.'

In other words, far from protecting the right of each man to express his political opinions as he will, this charter limits the protection of the right to free speech and the right to the freedom of the press to the right to support the 'permissible' opinions defined by the charter.

Her example is the outrageous decision to allow "Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, a failed asylum seeker who ran over a 12-year old girl and left her to 'die like a dog,'" to stay because deporting him would violate his rights to family and private life, enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in the European Union that is part of the Lisbon Treaty, passed without that referendum promised to us by all three main parties.

But to the point about the freedoms allegedly secured in the charter (a charter which, I will repeat, has been secured by Cameron): since this so-called 'right to repsect for private and family life' is guaranteed in Article 7, that means that, according to Article 54, none of us has the right to campaign for the destruction of that article.

In other words, while Ibrahim can kill and the charter will protect his freedom to stay in Britain, any British citizen campaigning against the ludicrous justice-dodging wheezes in the charter can be stripped of his right to free speech, and any journalist doing the same thing can lose the protection of the freedom of the press.